Then the company went global. Now you have an array of sites in several languages in Europe and Asia. It takes months to make the item available on each of them. The shiny new product never gets to Latin America; by the time you've completed the arduous rollout process elsewhere, your product group has released its shinier, newer successor.
Survival for the CIO in that kind of environment means keeping the business happy and fulfilling its requests - the "order taker" IT model. The CIO can see the entire business process but isn't empowered to do anything about it except point out the potential pitfalls and functional disconnects. It's a no-win situation at best and an efficiency-killer at worst.
The agility so many companies lack is elusive because it requires investment in streamlining your systems. Eliminating regional variations of the same application. Reducing their number. Virtualizing servers. And streamlining isn't sexy. In a tough economy, it doesn't seem pressing. It can wait until next year. Then the day comes when it would be nice to add a new payment option or roll out a new product, and the IT department can't accommodate a request that would make a real difference to the bottom line.
Deferring the IT investment that increases agility isn't a way to curb costs, it's a means of subsidizing inefficiency. It used to be that a company would decide to implement a new business process and then cobble together the systems to make it work. But that's not possible any longer. The systems must be nimble enough to accommodate new business processes as they come along, immediately.
It's no coincidence that the examples I've given touch on the company Website and its ability to incorporate new products or processes. Online is the perfect illustration of the degree to which the distinction between business and technology is vanishing. Technology was once a tool that facilitated business functions, but now it's embedded in every aspect of the business. We can no longer separate technology from the business process it enables.